Adam Cooper F1

Hulkenberg was caught out by the track staying green

Nico Hulkenberg admits that he was surprised by the late call for a VSC after Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz crashed that ultimately cost him two places in the Formula 1 Azerbaijan GP.

He also spoke to FIA race director Niels Wittich on the matter immediately after the Baku race.

The Haas driver passed the yellows at the accident scene, and he assumed from past experience that given its scale that there would be an immediate red flag or safety car situation.

In fact the rest of the track remained green and on realising that both Lewis Hamilton and Hulkenberg’s own team mate Oliver Bearman got the jump on the German, demoting him from ninth place to 11^th before the VSC was called for and positions were frozen.

“I think I was certainly surprised that it went back to green, and it took quite a while then for the VSC to come out,” Hulkenberg said in Singapore on Thursday.

“I think in recent history, and for example in Melbourne last year after the Alpine crash, the red flag happened very, very quickly. So certainly a bit different to I think how it’s been handled in the past. So that was surprising.

“But all-in-all it was a difficult weekend in Baku somehow. And Sunday actually looked pretty alright, it looked like we were on for a happy end.

“But in the last two laps, things went south, and slipped through our through our hands, which obviously is very frustrating, and a missed opportunity. But I’ve turned the page, I’ve moved on.”

Hulkenberg confirmed that he spoke to Wittich about the yellow flag situation.

“I went to see Niels after the race,” he noted. “I can’t say too much. He felt that he handled it how he usually handles it. He didn’t feel that it was different.”

He added: “I suspect it’s going to come up tomorrow in the drivers’ meeting. I don’t know what the outcome will be, or the consequence, but I think we’ll talk about it and see if it’s going to be any different in the future.”

Hulkenberg insisted that his frustration wasn’t compounded by the fact that he was jumped by own his rookie team mate.

“No, the contrary to be honest, that we did pick up a point, and more relief than frustration,” he said when asked by this writer.

“Ollie did a great job all weekend. He almost didn’t put a foot wrong. A very challenging track. I guess it helps that I think someone said that it’s one of his favourite tracks, and he was very confident. He was really on the money. So fair play to him, he did really well.”

Albon says that Williams still has work to do…

Alex Albon admits that his Williams FW46 still has “some problems” despite what he called a “luxurious” result for the team in the Azerbaijan GP.

Albon finished seventh in Baku and his rookie team mate Franco Colapinto was eighth as the team bagged 10 points and jumped its close rivals Alpine for eighth place in the constructors’ championship.

However despite the ostensibly similar nature of the venues Albon is cautious about the car’s potential in Singapore this weekend, noting that the team has items to test on Friday.

“I would say Singapore historically has been maybe the worst track of the year for us,” he said when asked by this writer about his prospects. “A hot track, a lot of tyre overheating problems.

“As good as the car was this weekend, there’s still some problems with it. We’ve got some items we want to test for next week in FP1 and FP2. Hopefully we can come up with a better solution for Singapore.”

Nevertheless Albon agreed that the Baku result was a boost for the team, and a clear sign that recent upgrades are working.

“I think we’re in front of Alpine now, which was the target at the end of the year,” he said. “We were talking before about how difficult P10 and P9 was, so to get a P7 and a P8 is luxurious.

“We’ll take that and, yeah it shows that we’ve made great progress with the upgrade again.

“That’s another points finish. That’s another weekend where we’ve been positively quick, I think, very similar to the Aston Martin in terms of pace. Let’s see next week. But for this weekend, it’s been very strong.”

Albon was the highest placed driver on the Baku grid to start on the hard tyres, and his long first stint saw him mixing it with the leaders after they had pitted, while also holding off fellow hard starter Lando Norris.

“We did a different strategy to pretty much the majority of the grid,” he said. “I don’t think it was the quickest strategy in the end. The reason for that was the amount of time we lost with the top teams in that midfield fight when I think I was getting overtaken by everyone, Oscar, Charles and Checo.

“It was 6-7 seconds of race time that would have put us quite easily in front of Fernando, I think, on a race pace. But that was actually because we were almost too quick.

“We thought they were going to come out in front of us, and I would have carried on on my own race, but actually they came out behind me.”

Regarding his time loss while running with the leaders he added: “I wasn’t trying to race them. I was trying to reduce as much lap time as possible, but it was almost identical to blue flags, because I had worn tyres, and then I was getting all the dirty air.

“I was losing a lot of tyre temperature when I was fighting them. So actually it wasn’t that enjoyable. I was hoping they would pull away a little bit quicker.”

Albon was frustrated that he didn’t get a chance to attack Alonso in the closing laps after the Perez/Sainz collision.

“I would like to have seen, because I just got within DRS as the crash happened,” he said.

“But to be honest with you, it’s not that easy to overtake Fernando obviously, and he was on a lower rear wing, so I don’t think it would be that easy.”

Krack is hoping that “track specific” floors don’t become a trend

Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack hopes that the Silverstone outfit doesn’t get into a routine of experimenting with different AMR24 floors on race weekends in search of a track specific benefit.

In Baku last weekend the team tried different options and eventually decided to go back to an earlier version that worked well at that venue.

Traditionally teams have brought floor upgrades that stay on the car for all types of circuits.

However this year many teams have been swapping back and forth after finding that their latest updates don’t necessarily work as planned.

Krack is wary of getting into a situation of flying multiple versions of the floor around the world in search of what works best at a given venue.

While floors are obviously very light their large size and the volume of the flight cases in which they need to travel means that they are hugely expensive to freight, with a direct impact on a team’s cost cap allowance.

“They are different,” said Krack when asked by this writer about the team’s floor experimentation in Baku.

“Some are better in this area, some are better in that area. And that is what we chose to do that, we tried it.

“And you can even call it circuit specific by now, which is scary, because you have to carry floors around the world, which is not a cheap way to transport.”

Asked if a circuit specific floor choice could become a regular feature he said: “Well, I hope not. You have here a track with this heavy low-speed bias, and then you have tracks where you have basically all speeds, and then you have tracks where there is more high-speed bias.

“And with the way the aerodynamics have evolved, they are so on the limit that for us, and maybe also for some other teams, you always have to consider what is the best for you now. I don’t think that the race winner is doing that at the moment.”

Krack says that there are more updates to come for the AMR24.

“We are were still working on bringing parts going forward,” he said. “These are parts that have been developed already, and we try to bring them when they are finished, as quickly as possible.

“We bring them as quick as we can. If something is finished earlier, we bring it to Singapore, and if not, we bring it later, as they come.”

The team was given a boost by Fernando Alonso’s sixth place in Baku, the Spaniard gaining from the late Sainz/Perez crash after working his way into eighth.

“It was the maximum,” said Krack. “We saw from these fights that were going on you had to be on your toes, and you had to be there, because something could happen anytime.

“Even at the very front with Piastri and Leclerc, with the fights that were going on, we said we need to be we need to have this position, because if something happens, we can capitalise on it. And we managed to.

“To be honest we were quite concerned for the tyres going into the race. Fernando managed them really well, and he still had some juice in them when it mattered at the end, when Albon came with fresh mediums, I was surprised how easy was to hold him off.”

Krack acknowledged that Alonso’s drive would probably go under the radar: “It’s super unfair to be honest, because it will go down like a P6. But if you see yesterday, if you see today, I don’t think that the car was really in that position. So we maximised obviously the good starting position.

“But then you have also to bring it home, because you have quick cars all around you trying. One is undercutting, the other one is staying out. What do you do? And this was really well managed, I think, from the pitwall as well.

“You know what you do in that situation. But then also we attacked. We are hard on tyres, so to bring it home was a fantastic achievement.”

Alonso also benefited from a lower downforce setup than his team mate Lance Stroll.

“It was a choice,” said Krack. “Basically coming here we saw here that you need to have proper speed. We were surprised about the low grip. So I think what happened to us, is what happened to everybody, you had to go up on load because the grip of the track was too low.

“The cars were different. We had a little bit more load on Lance’s car, but he was still having speed. Fernando said in the debrief that he was not feeling vulnerable on the straight at any time. So that was good.”

Bearman let Hulkenberg past, but then got him at the end….

Oliver Bearman says that going wheel-to-wheel with veteran Lewis Hamilton in only his second Formula 1 start in Baku was “very clean, but hard” racing.

Hamilton got past Bearman in the late stages, and then both men gained places from the Sainz/Perez crash.

They also both passed Bearman’s Haas team mate Nico Hulkenberg immediately after the accident scene, just before the VSC was dispatched.

In taking 10^th place Bearman also became the first driver in history to score points for two different teams in his first two races.

“It’s definitely cool,” he said when asked by this writer about the record. “It was a tough race. I wasn’t running in the points until the end, because of the crash in front.

“The car was really fast, and honestly, I was really fast as well. I just lost a lot of time in the first stint, just not driving very fast, just saving the tyres too much.

“And that was not really necessary. I took too much the experience from FP2 into the race.

“But honestly, the track is so different in the race that you can almost forget the long runs in FP2, and start again. I put it down to experience.”

Hamilton caught him at one stage early in the race before dropping back to save his tyres and the closing back up again.

“We were going like that, like a yo-yo, quite a lot,” he said. “I was really pushing hard for some laps to overtake Franco [Colapinto].

“And my tyres were really hot, and it was exactly at that point that he pounced on me, and could overtake me quite easily.

“After that, I needed a few laps, then I caught him back up, and I was almost catching the DRS again. So yeah, it’s annoying that I let him overtake. But a guy like that, you can do little mistakes.”

Asked what it was like to race the seven-times champion Bearman said: “You know when you go on the outside that he’s going to leave you space, which is a nice feeling.

“Like in Turn 1, I knew he wasn’t going to put me in the wall, which is a bit less sure with some other drivers! So that’s a nice feeling. And it was always very clean but hard when I was racing him.”

Regarding his opportunistic late pass of Hulkenberg he said: “It went green again, and I managed to get him, with Lewis. Yeah, it was an overtake. Of course I’m sorry for him – he had a problem – to lose the position, also to Franco, but good to take a point.”

Earlier in the race when Bearman was ahead the team asked its drivers to swap positions, so he allowed Hulkenberg to pass.

“I wanted one more lap to speed up, but they didn’t want that,” he noted. “But that’s fine, I wasn’t fast enough at that point in the race, and I was getting in the way of the strategy at that point.

“Nico was by far the faster car, so it’s really my fault that I wasn’t pushing hard enough. That really compromised my race, the fact that I was too slow in the first stint, because I got myself in some traffic for the second one.”

Williams had a great day in Baku in earning seventh and eighth

Franco Colapinto admits that his Williams Formula 1 team and its boss James Vowles made a “difficult bet” by promoting him to a race seat and ousting Logan Sargeant.

The Argentine driver adds that he hopes that he has been able demonstrate that he deserves to have a seat.

Colapinto impressed the F1 paddock in Baku by not letting an FP1 crash distract him and by subsequently qualifying ninth and finishing eighth at a track he had not previously seen.

He still has a chance to land a Sauber race drive for net year, with the Swiss outfit in no hurry and assessing all its options.

“They showed so much confidence and trust in putting me in a seat,” he said of the Williams decision.

“It was a very difficult bet, and a bet that many people didn’t understand. But I hope I come to be showing what I’m capable of, that I deserve a seat in F1.

“The opportunity that James gave me is helping me to show that. I am just doing a lot of work to try to learn quick I have very little mileage in an F1 car. It’s only two races, and FP1, and a few laps in Abu Dhabi last year.

“But I think with the little mileage I got to be in the points in the second race, is something really positive, and really good.”

Colapinto chased Fernando Alonso at one stage in the Baku race and admitted that holding off Lewis Hamilton really brought home what he has achieved in finding himself battling with multiple World Champions.

“When I started to think a bit of that was when Lewis caught me,” he said. “First, I had to keep him behind for Alex [Albon], because if he catches Alex, we were going to lose some points.

“So I tried to use the tyres again. And then suddenly they woke up. And it was that moment where I started to pull away from Lewis, and having a really, really strong pace again with those tyres that were really old.

“It was a point in the race that made me realise a bit where I was, and that was keeping Lewis behind. A proud moment. He said he was driving very well, but we managed to keep him behind, so it was very nice.”

Colapinto didn’t have an easy Sunday in Baku, spending much of the race managing tyres after he was the first driver to pit and had to do 41 laps to the flag on the hards.

“I found very tough the middle part of the race,” he said. “We were really struggling with the tyres. I managed very well the mediums in the first stint. It was very hot, and the mediums were suffering a lot, but we did a great job on that first stint.

“Then a good pit stop, but the tyres were out of the window completely. I was managing a lot the rears. I was just not sure how much I had to manage, how much I could push.

“And I think it’s part of experience, to be very close to Alonso, but I was not sure how much the tyres were going to last. I still had 25 or 27 laps to go, and I was like, really crazy to attack him now!

“I kept doing a lot of management, which the team was asking me to do. But then whenever anyone started to get close to us we stopped the management, and after Hulkenberg passed me, we started to push.

“And then suddenly the front tyres woke up again, and my front was completely open since the first few laps. My front was fully grained, and I had no grip. And then suddenly they woke up, they switched on again, and I started to get a lot of grip.

“That’s why I finished the race so strong and in very good lap times, keeping Lewis behind and pulling away and making a gap. So it was I think a very strong end to the race.”

Colapinto also praised engineer Gaeten Jago, who in a radio pep talk on the grid reminded him that it would be a long race and that there could be points as a reward.

“He’s been on it in every race, in every session that I’ve been doing,” said Colapinto. “He knows how much help I need at this stage, and how much I need the support from the team, and how much I need someone to be there helping me.

“I don’t know many, many, many things, and it’s really tough to come straight into an F1 weekend and be on it with all these things, but they are helping me to do so. I changed the mode like 25 million times this race in between walls.

“My seat was getting really hot. I was asking if there was a mode to maybe make the seat a bit colder, but there wasn’t! It was a good race, and I am still learning a lot. I’m learning to manage the car better, and just really happy to be improving every session.”